"Evolutionary insights have radically improved our ability to understand (explain) the natural world around us, including how we understand ourselves and our relationship to the rest of the natural world. For the past century and half, evolutionary arguments have been advanced that have looked to explain human morality as a feature of our biological origins, as a capacity or propensity endowed to us by our evolutionary history. Recent research programs within psychology, ethology, and game theory have purported to explain morality. The prolific efforts of these researchers, concentrated especially over the past two decades, has resulted in an impressive literature about the evolution of morality. It is unclear how, if at all, these research programs fit together into a coherent explanation of morality, though there is a tendency in the literature to presume such a moral synthesis that could connect these research endeavors in a meaningful way. This is the central task I seek to accomplish. First, I look for a reportive account of morality-as-explanandum, to see if there is reason to think that the explanations being proposed by these different research programs are ostensibly aiming to explain the same phenomenon. I find sufficient overlap in how the evolutionary approaches conceive of morality, namely that it is a phenomenon that includes social interactions involving behaviors often relevant to helping and hurting others, and the perception and response to these interactions involves the stimulation of an affective moral sense that is combined with rational cognitive processing and consideration of cultural elements such as values, norms, or expectations of approval or disapproval during moral judgment. While the research programs of evolutionary psychology, ethology, and evolutionary game theory are attempting to explain the same phenomenon when they talk about morality, work remains to demonstrate how the different methodological kinds of explanations could fit together. For those who adopt a unity of science view, there is a tendency to prefer explanatory reductionism or explanatory eliminativism that identifies a preferred mode of explanation and removes others. Rejecting such a tendency, I endorse a pluralistic approach that allows for multiple modes of explanation to contribute to our understanding of the same phenomenon. I detail the kinds of explanation that each of the three evolutionary approaches offers, and then argue that Pennock's CaSE pragmatic model of causation could be used to demonstrate that, in principle, the explanations of each approach can be integrated. Pluralistically weaving the explanations of each approach together yields a more robust and complete account of the causal web that has produced our biological capacities for morality. Furthermore, beyond just giving a more complete account of the causal web, integrating the approaches also helps to insulate the explanatory claims of each from some its more pressing objections. For instance, while evolutionary psychology is susceptible to critiques of adaptationism, by demonstrating that the behavioral building blocks of the proposed innate psychological intuition can be found in our phylogenetic neighbors gives reason to think that the trait has an adaptive function and has been preserved by selective pressures. Similarly, game theoretic approaches can demonstrate via models that the behavioral tendency is, in fact, adaptive and causally advantageous to reproductive success."--Pages ii-iii.
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